14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, Advanced Micro Devices sent us an e-mail in which it said that its Radeon R9 graphics cards had been experiencing an “astonishing” demand ever since the first month of the year. Now we learn that, somehow, AMD still lost some of its market share in this segment.
The video cards from AMD are a curious thing, selling for exorbitant amounts because they sold a lot better than anyone expected.
It's all owed to miners of virtual currency really, who use the parallel computing capabilities of these video boards to find Bitcoins and the other “make-believe” money
Due to this high demand, Radeon R9 series of video boards sold for nearly double the normal price rates during the first quarter.
And all the while, AMD didn't profit from that all that much, as most of the extra money demanded for each product went to the retailers.
Considering all of that, it doesn't shock us so much to learn that AMD's overall unit shipments for the first quarter of 2014 decreased compared to Q4 2013.
In fact, the drop was of 18.2%, quite a lot even when you factor in the higher sales of the holiday shopping season.
On that note, Intel's total shipments dropped 7.9% as well, and NVIDIA saw a decline of 10.4% of its own.
Nonetheless, in the end, it wasn't AMD that came out with anything positive, but Intel, while NVIDIA managed to only maintain its existing position.
In layman terms, that means that the number of sales that AMD scored decreased, while Intel's rose and NVIDIA's stayed level.
According to Jon Peddie Research, overall shipments of graphics processing units (GPUs) and integrated graphics processor (iGPs) went down 11.6% on average.
AMD lost 1.6% market share, ending up with 18.3% versus the 20.6% of last year. Intel, meanwhile, secured 65.1% (all those CPUs with integrated graphics keep paying off), gaining 1.7% over the 60.8% of 2013.
Finally, NVIDIA's share stayed at 16.6% (that's what it gets for only having a stake in the mid- and high-end markets).
All this is not necessarily owed to some mistake on the part of AMD or the others though. The primary reason for the decrease in GPU shipments was a marked slip in overall PC shipments, of 9% or so. And with the other 2.6% easily blamed on the slow season (which the first quarter of a year always is), one could say that the findings of JPR aren't alarming at all.
No doubt that AMD would have avoided the slip if it had put its foot down in regard to the exorbitant Radeon R9 prices earlier.